Tag: Westward Expansion

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are the words that established an independent United States. It is these values that many continue to point to as essential to the nature of the country—the promise of existence as human, the assurance of freedom from tyranny, the right to pursue wellness. They are supreme ideals, a foundation of justice and equality upon which to build a society. But, the idea that these rights should extend to all humans is relatively new to U.S. history—the founding fathers did not intend for the full extension of the Declaration of Independence to colonial women, native peoples, or enslaved or free people of African descent.

In fact, in July 1852, Frederick Douglass, an African American abolitionist and orator, called attention to the fact that people of African descent continued to be denied the rights inscribed in the Declaration of Independence. By continuing slavery, the U.S. government did not merely fail to deliver the basic rights to enslaved people, it actively prevented these people from being able to obtain life, liberty, or wellness. “Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us,” said Douglass. “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”

Truly, independence did not belong to all people. It certainly did not belong to all people in the former colonies in 1783. The peace treaty that ended the Revolutionary War and acknowledged the autonomy of the colonists also ignored land rights of native peoples (allowing them to be seen as “foreign nations” by the new U.S. government) and characterized black people as property. The new nation did not affirm the liberty of women of any race or ethnicity.

In fact, the Revolution itself, which we often view as an inevitable and logical response to the tyranny of British government, did not belong to all people in North America either. The common focus on the words of Jefferson and Paine, the idealistic commitment in action of Paul Revere and George Washington, and the engagement of crowds to fight British taxation often belies that “pursuit of happiness” in the colonies did not always take the form of allegiance to the patriots.

Notable members of the “Sons of Liberty,” a name given to some groups of colonial patriots leading the fight for independence. (Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons).

For many white colonists, objection to taxation without representation did not necessitate a desire for independence. Many, attached to their British identity and the safety of being part of a larger British empire in the face of competition from the French for land, fought as loyalists. Even some of those who fought with the patriots in Quebec, Bunker Hill, Lexington, and Concord did so hoping to gain better representation in Parliament or autonomy over colonial finance rather than a complete break from Britain.

For enslaved people, forms of government or taxation were largely irrelevant. Freedom from tyranny meant freedom from the bonds of slavery. Enslaved people selected their alliances based on who they believed would deliver this liberty. Some fought for the patriots, hoping that this would earn them the loyalty of a new government if independence were to occur. Others fought for the British, expecting that their service would be exchanged for freedom by a British government whose politics seemed to be drifting towards the prospect of abolition.

For native peoples, alliance-building was also a gamble. For native nations that aligned themselves with the patriots, promises of fuller autonomy after independence were key. For those aligned with the British, there was a reliance on a stronger hand from the metropole, which had typically restricted colonists’ expansion and the movement of the frontier.

Thinking beyond the patriotic language of the Sons of Liberty, we are forced to ask many more questions about American Independence. Whose Revolution was this? What was rebellion really about? What did “liberty” mean to different people in the colonies? How do we explain those who were “patriotic” to something other than the ideals of the patriots? How does this diversity of identity, political opinion, and economic interest help us understand the United States today?

These questions have profound importance for understanding the past and the future of the United States. Acknowledging that independence in the eighteenth century was incomplete helps show the reality of the United States being a continued work in progress. Freeing the country from the illusion that the pinnacle of justice and liberty was situated hundreds of years ago empowers learners to consider what the national goal should be, which of the principles of independence and revolution still need to be attained, and what we can learn from both the successes and limitations of the past. Examining how people in the revolutionary era made choices helps learners grapple with the options they face today.

Keep a look out for the new Choices curriculum unit, The American Revolution: Experiences of Rebellion, coming in 2016!
The unit considers how the varied populations of seventeenth and eighteenth century North America experienced and viewed colonization and revolution, encouraging students to step into the shoes of people in 1776 to debate the future of the thirteen colonies.Watch our home page for the release of this unit.

My favorite Choices unit to use is Westward Expansion: A New History because it does such a good job of making the complex relationships that existed on shifting peripherals of expansion so tangible to students. While the case study approach is excellent for diving deep into the topic, I always stress about providing enough “coverage” for the rest of the standards involved in the topic. This year I balanced the need for both while incorporating technology and project based learning.

I took an approach to the unit where I started with a very broad overview of the topic so that students developed an idea of how all the events were connected. Instead of lecturing I had students complete a Western Expansion Webquest that was created using Thinglink which allows the user to add interactive links and notations to pictures. I added some interesting sources (they enjoyed the Donner Party video the most) to get students curious about the topic and to spark some questions. I also purposely added biased depictions of Native Americans to fuel our later conversations about historical perspective. Students accessed the webquest and accompanying webquest questions through Edmodo.

Once students completed the webquest we were able to start having discussions and they SOAPed the American Progress picture based on what they had learned. From there we worked through the Choices lessons including the analysis of the Kiowas Meet Smallpox myth, Maps from Four Perspectives, and O’odham Calendar Sticks to slowly narrow our focus on southern Arizona before culminating in the role play activity.

The Choices unit contains an interesting project idea for designing an exhibit for a visitor center that explains the different perspectives that led to conflict in southern Arizona. However, I wanted my students to take the history skills they had practiced and apply them while also addressing historical perspective in the broader picture of other Westward Expansion events. I designed a new Western Expansion Exhibit Project (note the embedded hyperlinks with individual project instructions) that allowed students to have a great deal of choice in the topics and project types that they completed to showcase their learning.

Students did an amazing job creating interesting projects and wound up being able to share them with an authentic audience of fellow middle school students from Australia that we communicated with through Edmodo. This also led to some further discussion and comparisons between the “silent histories” of Native Americans and the aboriginal people of Australia.

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In recent years, scholars have worked to reexamine the history of the West by focusing on Native American groups. With limited sources, they have pieced together histories that do not generalize the experiences of Native Americans, and that accurately portray the complicated interactions that occurred in the West.

A new curriculum resource from the Choices Program, Westward Expansion: A New History looks at this reexamined history from two historical perspectives. First, students explore U.S. expansion from a broad perspective by considering the major events and policies that accompanied U.S. westward growth in the nineteenth century. Then students explore this history on a local level using the research of Brown University Professor Karl Jacoby on the effects of U.S. expansion on groups in southern Arizona. This case study is not emblematic of the entire West; rather, it allows students to understand the complicated and violent ways in which U.S. expansion affected specific individuals and communities. Students are challenged to consider the ways in which we remember history, and efforts to re-envision the past.

Choices recently produced videos of Colin Calloway of Dartmouth College and Karl Jacoby of Brown University for use with these materials.